Mindless_Enigma
I’m not a lawyer or anything, but I have to assume there’s some kind of process for checking citations you’re taught along the way that go beyond trusting what a computer writes.
I know he said his assumed that ChatGPT had some kind of access to data other sites didn’t but not finding those cases anywhere else should’ve raised red flags. People need some refreshers on computer literacy.
It’s neat to see them using ActivityPub, but I’m really wary of anything created under the Meta/Facebook umbrella. We’ll have to wait and see if they decide to act in good faith with this which my biases make me doubtful they will.
Also, if they’re using ActivityPub, why would I have to join if I can just loop in with my existing Mastodon account?
I can see comments and posts on their profile from communities I’m not in. Not quite sure why that isn’t the case for you. Maybe a weird quirk of how the different instances are federated. Looks like they’re talking about !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz. As for finding communities, I don’t know what the UI is like outside of Beehaw, but when I go to the community list I can chose to search all instances to find communities all over.
If downvotes had been used as originally intended, they would be perfectly fine. But the cultural shift over time on the site from “downvote things not adding to the conversation” to “downvote what I don’t agree with” made their existence more toxic to conversations. Weighing down unpopular opinions in the sort feed made it even easier for echo chambers to build up. Having a way to give comments that are productive a bump is enough for effectively sorting things.
The article mentions they’ll do this with “new technology” but following the links I can’t find any specific details on what they’re referring to. 600 miles of range is a sizable jump from current standards, but it sounds like they’re just stating the obvious that eventually we’ll hit 600+ miles of range as batteries improve.
To me, the biggest improvements will continue to be charge times. Right now there’s such a hard barrier with BEVs when your trip crosses the threshold from “just have to charge before and after” to “have to plan where to stop for hours to charge.”
I don’t really like the logic of “chatbots like this will help cure loneliness.” It might help someone feel less lonely at first. But then it’ll be a crutch and, if anything, hurt people’s ability to socialize with other real people. Like it’s a quick dopamine hit that will slowly dig you deeper into the hole you feel you’re in.
Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.
As others have said, you can sequester IoT devices to a VLAN that has no internet access. Most of the common devices (lights, switches, sensors) added to smart homes work perfectly fine without access to the internet. Voice assistants are the biggest security/privacy hole since all commercial options are from big tech companies and phone home constantly. If you set up a local homeassistant instance you can get a ton of functionality out of smart devices with no direct connection to the internet. You need to decide how you handle accessing homeassistant from outside your home if that’s something you want but there are plenty of options to choose from for that.
One thing I will say that I refuse to add to my home is any kind of smart locks. No matter how much I trust my security setup, I don’t trust it with the ability to unlock my doors. If there was one that could only lock them electronically but required being manually unlocked, them maybe. But I haven’t seen a lock like that out there.